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There are even rumors among science-fiction fans of the long-awaited, almost-given-up-on adaptations of William Gibson's cyberspace opera Neuromancer and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, which is not unlike The Hunger Games but in zero gravity. There's a weird aura of manifest destiny around successful novels, a pervasive belief that they must progress through the stages of life and become movies, as the caterpillar becomes the butterfly: the movie industry treats narrative like a precious nonrenewable resource that must be carefully recycled and never just wasted on mere paper.
The problems aren't necessarily insoluble; they just require directors to confront in a hard-nosed way the differences between the two media. Most novels have too much plot in them to comfortably become movies. They're just not meant to be consumed in a single sitting. As a storytelling medium, movies have much more in common with short stories. Which is why I applaud the decision to largely amputate the story of Kitty and Levin, the less obviously dramatic couple, from the upcoming adaptation of Anna Karenina. It's a bloody business, but it's a question of saving the patient.
Likewise, directors have to improvise filmic equivalents to literary devices rather than try to transcribe those devices directly onto the screen. Which is about as difficult as it sounds. To do it, the director needs a cinematic voice that's as strong and confident as the writer's written one. William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch was considered too grotesque and chaotic to film when David Cronenberg took it on. In adapting it, he violated fidelity in any number of ways. Cherry-picking with both hands not only from the book but also from Burroughs' life, Cronenberg forced a cinematic coherence onto the story that Burroughs' version lacked. The resulting movie's literal resemblance to the book is distant, but they share the same perverse, surreal integrity.
Perfect translation is impossible: a book, however deftly adapted, remains a book, and a movie must be a movie. My personal favorite "impossible" adaptation is Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's take on Laurence Sterne's protopostmodern colossus. Winterbottom turns the story inside out into a movie about the making of a movie, specifically an only moderately successful adaptation of Tristram Shandy. A Cock and Bull Story isn't just an adaptation; it's a bittersweet essay on the inherently failed, quixotic nature of adaptations--and as such, it's a miraculous success.
Cloud Atlas is also, in a weird way, a story about adaptation. Whether or not you consider it a success as a movie--I thought it was fatally flawed, but then again I thought the book had the same flaws--it's ingenious the way themes and ideas transmigrate from story to story, transcending their particular circumstances. The actors themselves float among narratives, assuming different roles in different periods; Tykwer has described them as "playing souls, not characters." It's a nice metaphor for adaptation, which could be considered the reincarnation of a story from one medium into another. But before something can be reincarnated, it first must die. The trick is not just to celebrate what survives but to mourn what is lost.